Before analyzing the data on venture capital for the second quarter, this week we looked at the perspective of the venture capital world on transactions via Zoom. A few months ago, the question was open as to whether VCs would simply stop making new investments if they could not cut them in person with the founders. It turns out that it was mostly wrong.
This week we learned that most VCs are ready to enter into distance agreements, although 40% of VCs have done so. This raises a worrying question: if only 40% of venture capital firms have actually reached a distance agreement, how many deals have taken place in Q2?
Judging from my inbox over the past few months, this has been an active period. But we cannot rely on anecdata for this subject; The stock market will analyze Q2 VC data next week, hopefully, provided we can collect the data points we need to have confidence in our hold. More soon.
Private markets
As TipsClear reported on Friday, some startups delay raising capital by a few quarters. They can do this by limiting spending. The question for startups doing this is what shape they will be in when they surface to hunt for new funds; can they still grow at an attractive rate while trying to expand their track through the conservation of burns?
But there is another option in addition to waiting to restart a new round, and not to restart at all. Startups can increase the extension of their previous agreement! Maybe I notice something that is not a trend, or not yet, but there have been a number of startups recently lifting extensions that have caught my eye. For example, this week MariaDB raised a $ 25 million Series C extension, for example. This week, Sayari also raised $ 2.5 million in a Series B expansion. CALA raised $ 3 million in a Seed expansion. Finally, on the other side of the pond, the machine labs gathered a million pounds in another seed extension this week.
I'm still not sure how to digitally explore the available business data to find out if we're really seeing an extension wave, but let me know if you have any notes to share. And, to be completely clear, the above tricks could easily be just random and not thematic, so please don't read them more deeply than they have been announced in recent days and correspond to some thing we are looking at.
Public markets
In the public markets, the news is good. Technology stocks are generally on the rise and software stocks hit new records this week. It's almost impossible to remember how scary the world was in March and April in the current Halcyon stock market, but only a few months ago stocks were going down sharply.
The return to form has helped a number of companies go public this year, such as Vroom, Accolade, Agora and others. This week has been another busy time for startups, old startups and other companies looking to get out.
Quickly to save time, this week we got to see GoHealth's first IPO line, the second from nCino (more on the finances of the two companies here), learned that Palantir is going public (it's is financial history as best we can tell here), and even got a stock exchange (S-1) from Rackspace, as it turns to the public markets again.
The Stock Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, and now you can receive it in your inbox. Subscribe to the The Exchange newsletter, which falls every Friday from July 25.The IPO waters are so hot that Lemonade is still up over 100% from its IPO price. As long as growing companies that are miles away from making money can get rich evaluations, expect companies to keep running out of the public market.
There are fun things on the horizon. Coinbase could file later this year, or early 2021. And the Airbnb IPO is likely to happen in four or five quarters. Prepare to read some documents filed with the SEC.
Funding rounds to note
The coolest financing round of the week was obviously the one I mentioned, which was the $ 2.2 million that MonkeyLearn raised from a pair of lead investors. But other companies have raised funds, and among them, the following investments have stood out:
- Sony paid a quarter of a billion dollars to the manufacturer of Fortnite, for a 1.4% stake. This series is distinguished by the small size of Epic Games which Sony got hold of. This is reminiscent of the recent flood of investment in Jio.
- TruePill has raised $ 25 million in a B series. In the modern world, I find it hard to get rid of my ass, go to Walgreens or CVS, wait in line, then ask someone to sell me Claritin D. huge waste of time. TruePill, which supplies pharmaceuticals, cannot arrive quickly enough. In addition, TruePill investors are probably well aware that Amazon spent $ 1 billion on PillPack just a few years ago.
- From the slightly offbeat category, this TipsClear title: "UK Farewill raises $ 25 million for its new online approach to wills, funerals and other death services." Farewill is such a bad startup name that it probably works; I won't forget it anytime soon, even if I don't live in the UK! And this agreement shows how big the Internet really is. There is so much demand for digital services that a company with special attention from Farewill can deliver sufficient revenue growth to order a $ 25 million B series.
- Finally, Ron Miller of TipsClear covered a $ 50 million investment in OwnBackup. What matters in this deal is how Ron talked about it: "OwnBackup has made a name for itself primarily as a backup and disaster recovery system for the Salesforce ecosystem, and the company announced today "A $ 50 million investment today." What can we learn from this? This Salesforce ecosystem may be bigger than we thought.
It's The Exchange for the week. Keep an eye on SaaS assessments, the latest S-1 filings and the latest funding. Chat Monday.
